Kim Dotcom
kim.com
kim.com
This entire ordeal tells us more about the current administration than Kim.
Everyone just does what America asks of them. It's shocking.
The right to self-determination is really only something America enjoys. When it needs to, it imposes its will upon other countries, often in the most cruel and twisted possible way.
tl;dr - there was a Constitutional crisis, with the House and Senate disagreeing. The Prime Minister didn't want to negotiate, or call for a new election, so he was removed.
This is the side of kim people seem to have collectively forgotten over the last 10 or so years in which he has disappeared and was making tons of money from mu.
This is nothing but the same stunt yet again.
I may or may not agree with the guys views, or activities, but he has helped a lot of poor people consume a lot of media they would not otherwise have had access to.
a) I don't think that truly poor people have the means to be spending their time "consuming media". That definitely falls at least close to "first world problem".
b) Despite the RIAA, which is an organization that deserves every bit of the scorn it gets, piracy mainly hurts artists, writers, and other "content creators". Creatives like me and a lot of other people on here. The suits that the RIAA really represents have plenty of other means to feed themselves.
I don't know how this guy made his money, but he ain't no saint.
I don't necessarily agree with the idea that only people in this state of existence can be called 'poor.' I'd say that 'poor' is more general, and that those people are at the extreme end of the 'poor' spectrum.
My point was more that I don't know how you can call someone poor who can't afford to buy the album or the book or the movie, but can somehow afford the device that they can play it on. That doesn't sound like my idea of "poor", it sounds more like "I don't feel like parting with my $15 right now".
Kim isn't a saint in my view, but let's not doubt how far and wide his mega site spread the free content net. There's a reason so many love the guy.
The truth is that he is going to milk this to the very last cent for all of his product launches. You saw his house and his lifestyle, do you think the Pirate Bay guys live like that? Even before being released, he was saying the media companies are afraid of his new site MegaBox. Ridiculous... . He has a long history of criminal activities of all kinds, just look at his wiki page.
He is literally "A Big Fat Phoney".
This guy absolutely disgusts me -- he doesn't give a shit about free speech, he just wants to live in his enormous mansion and eat far too much food and drive expensive cars and show off his trophy wife.
These people absolutely disgust me -- they don't give a shit about their loyal fans, they just want to live in their enormous mansions and eat far too much food and drive expensive cars and show off their sham Hollywood tabloid marriages.
People who are ideologically aligned to you you stand by, people who are co-incidentally aligned to you you get to choose. In the case of Kim dotcom I think I'd want to stand a long way away from the man - some of the current stuff may be trumped up but the older stuff seems pretty nailed on.
It saddens me so much that news.ycombinator has lowered to this kind of comments. And the fact that they are up-voted show the problem of the eternal September.
If users start using say github, to share movies, will the github founders be whisked away to jail and the site shut down without any due process?
Is free speech only good insofar as it can be used as a tool to create an ethically prudent world? Does free speech lose its appeal if it's invoked by Kim Dotcom and not only by rms?
He's trying to lump the Megaupload takedown alongside SOPA, PIPA, etc. to ride the wave of discontent that challenged those pieces of legislation.
It's cynical and insincere.
In a sense, as a fan of free speech, I'd rather he didn't associate himself with the cause.
he doesn't give a shit about free speech,
he just wants to live in his enormous mansion
and eat far too much food and drive expensive cars
and show off his trophy wife
My sense is that this takedown is supposed to send a message to the larger internet media companies. The small ones could be easy pickings, but the big ones like Netflix, Apple and Google are what the entertainment industry really cares about - and as they see their markets being transformed, they will fight with whatever they've got. And one thing they've got is the law and political experience.
They picked on Kim because he's an unlikeable character. He's rich and arrogant, and his alignment with hip hop and youth culture won't win him supporters in DC or in governments.
When one is reporting what the other is saying, make that three pinches of salt.
This appears to be an anti-obama website though he isn't making it directly clear. Sure, we should question our elected officials, and hold them against the standards on which they were elected (Change in Obama's case), and that's what he seems to be doing in the first section.
I'm just not sure why he is taking some of the goodwill he might have built up and directing it at Obama. I might be wrong, but I suspect he would be much worse off under a Romney Administration.
SOPA had
19 republican sponsors and supporters
35 democratic sponsors and supporters
https://projects.propublica.org/sopa/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_Congresspersons_who...
For those with German skills here are some of his posts at the de.org.ccc Usenet http://nopaste.me/paste/1978187886501000e66203f
(that was exactly why i instantly wrote the comment All that i can say to this post is "?". I don't know for sure, but i can't imagine that this is the first time for his site to be here and there is no valuable information at all that could be considered new...)
Nothing even has changed - i found no new information about anything on his site except maybe a new video (and i wasn't on it for at least a few weeks).
So i don't get it. I am surprised by the number of comments and up-votes for this imo completely worthless HN entry
I've sat and watched USA ring fence "illegal" online gambling, in a massive display of protectionism.
I've sat and watched Guantanamo bay.
I've sat and watched the Weapons of Mass Destruction debacle.
I've sat and watch Disney steal from the public domain and ring fence.
I've sat and watched USA Juries corruptly favour USA companies in patent trials.
Enough is enough.
I dont doubt the site is in Kim's 'enlightened self interest' as Aldous Huxley or Alexis de Tocqueville would say.
But I found it useful to absorb the information and ruminate.
Following Weapons of Mass Destruction debacle
== kim.com site linked on HN, while not conaining any new information and consisting of music videos and self promotion...??
And i didn't call case information about megaupload "worthless", i called this entry "worthless" (no new material, site is already well known, probably not the first time it has appeared here et cetera...)
Get a hold of yourself!
> The rights to the Kim.com domain cost a small fortune, but it was worth it.
[0] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/ff-kim-dotcom/all/
-) create a simple beat with maybe a slight variation when the chorus comes up, which takes 1 minute with todays software
-) fix missing singing talent through studio production / auto-tune / hearing exact singing line in headphones / professional software
-) don't think complicated: 4/4, some simple musical hooklines, lyrics about some stupid ass shit
popchart garbage that most of the world listens to. Kim's music videos are exactly the prove (if we would need any :/) that today's music is solely about producing, not about self expression, nice rhythmical designs, creativity or art in general...
In the end it is ALL about making money for him and it always has been. He has been doing the same "business" back in the 90s and famously turned over former associates to the police to cut deals.
From the early days, his questionable 'projects', his legal troubles back home, his money making schemes, him defrauding people on BMW M5 forums, etc. Then I didn't hear about him for 10 years.
When his name came out during the Megaupload uproar, I immediately remembered his name and his antics and without knowing anything about Megaupload I knew he was guilty as sin just based on his record.
What a frightening way to think.
That much is true.
But to take that notion and to say that all people will always repeat their past... that isn't true.
For whatever percent of people that would repeat their past, there remains at least a few that will learn from their past and change their future behaviour.
What is scary is that what you've expressed does not allow for rehabilitation or for people to learn from their past. What you've expressed is a view that once someone has been judged, then that leopard cannot change it's spots.
Taking your view to the logical conclusion: Experience counts for nothing, as no-one can learn from it. Teaching counts for nothing, as no-one can learn from it.
Here we are on HN, where one of the mantras repeated over and over is test and pivot. Try something, find you're wrong, learn from it, seek a different direction. To learn from failure what not to do in the future.
Your moral philosophy is that personal change and improvement is impossible as the leopard cannot change it's spots. This precludes from the outset any chance for social mobility, any chance of rehabilitation, any chance of humanity learning from our own history.
It is indeed a scary thought.